Partnership prevents SpotX’s advertising partners from running ads alongside fake news and problematic content related to terrorism, cryptocurrency mining, and more
DENVER — SpotX, the global video advertising and monetization platform, today announced new capabilities to strengthen brand safety across their video ad ecosystem. SpotX is increasing brand safety vetting through identification and categorization of fake news sources by integrating new advances from zvelo – one of SpotX’s trusted brand safety partners and the leading provider of categorization and malicious detection data services for web content, traffic, and connected devices.
By working with zvelo, SpotX expands the protection it offers advertisers by identifying and proactively blocking websites and content that fall into several new and objectionable categories such as fake news. In doing so, SpotX fully removes sites that disseminate fabricated news and disinformation from available ad inventory – categorically preventing advertisers from associating brand content with this objectionable content. This capability deepens SpotX’s commitment to offering vetted, premium ad inventory to publishers by providing another layer of verification and security for promoting a brand-safe ad buying ecosystem.
The prevalence of fake news has quickly become a concern for advertisers and an issue that plagues even the largest ad platforms. When ads do appear alongside fake news, brands not only risk wasting their ad spend, but also associating their brand with false claims and problematic content – which can cause significant and lasting harm to their reputation. This risk is accentuated by the fact that ad buyers often cannot control where their ads appear, especially in programmatic environments where buyers are not making one-off decisions. And, while buyers are keenly aware of the threats to brand safety via sites that include piracy, pornography, or graphic violence, fake news is a newer threat that is also more difficult to detect.
zvelo provides a classification engine that categorizes fake news using a combination of static and heuristic analysis techniques, aggregation of vetted third-party “fake news” feeds, and human-supervised machine learning. Utilizing a crowd-sourced approach, zvelo’s technology analyzes URLs visited by a global partner network of more than 550 million endpoints. Data is processed by the zvelo AI Cloud Network and then verified for quality by trained analysts. In addition to recognizing fake news, the zveloDB URL categorization database also helps prevent brands from appearing alongside content involving terrorism, cryptocurrency mining, and other rapidly-emerging brand safety categories. In order to take every precaution in vetting ad inventory, SpotX pairs the expertise of its independent, third-party brand safety and verification partners such as zvelo with the monitoring activities of its own in-house Brand Safety team.
“SpotX was the first supply-side platform that we partnered with in providing content categorization for brand safety, and we’re proud of the work we’ve done together to make the internet a safer place to advertise,” said Jeff Finn, CEO, zvelo. “At the same time, we’re excited to provide greater capabilities for the categorization of fake news sources than ever before, and to assist SpotX in offering a thoroughly vetted, brand-safe ad inventory for publishers.”
“Our expanded partnership with zvelo really reinforces SpotX’s unwavering commitment to brand safety, as well as our duty to clean up the video ad ecosystem and educate media buyers about fraudulent inventory as new threats emerge,” said Nick Frizzell, Sr. Director, Brand Safety & Inventory Operations, SpotX. “Empowered by zvelo’s technology, we’re able to help media buyers avoid brand-damaging associations with fake news. In an environment where buyers continually struggle to identify worthwhile ad inventory within the onslaught of new content and websites emerging every day, our zvelo-backed brand safety practices help publishers sort through the noise and successfully target advantageous ad placements.”
About SpotX
SpotX is the leading global video advertising platform that enables media owners and publishers to monetize premium content across desktop, mobile and connected TV devices. As a modern ad server with programmatic infrastructure, data enablement, and monetization solutions for OTT, outstream, and addressable TV, SpotX gives media owners and publishers the control, transparency, and actionable insights needed to understand buyer behavior, manage access and pricing, and maximize revenue. SpotX also provides advertisers with a direct pipeline to premium supply and innovative solutions for optimizing media efficiency, reach, and audience targeting. With best-in-class technology purpose-built for video, SpotX’s holistic, brand-safe solution is employed by some of the largest media owners and publishers in the world including fuboTV, Microsoft Casual Games, Newsy, Samba TV, Sling TV, Vudu and partners with a variety of different companies within the digital video ecosystem including comScore, DoubleVerify, Integral Ad Science, JW Player, MediaMath, MOAT, Nielsen, Oracle, The Trade Desk, and more.
Headquartered in Denver, SpotX has nearly 600 employees in 24 offices worldwide including Amsterdam, Hamburg, London, Los Angeles, Milan, New York, Paris, San Francisco, Singapore, Stockholm, Sydney, and Tokyo. In October 2017, RTL Group completed its 100% acquisition of SpotX which is currently combining its business with smartclip, a sister company.
Learn more at www.spotx.tv and follow @SpotX on Twitter and LinkedIn.
About zvelo, Inc.
As a leading provider of content categorization and malicious detection data services for web pages, web traffic, and connected devices, zvelo is the trusted partner for the market’s preeminent network security, ad tech, and IoT security vendors. zvelo solves a diverse range of business needs including providing the foundational datasets for web filtering, parental controls, brand safety, ad fraud prevention, contextual targeting, subscriber analytics, device providing, compromised device detection and alerting. zvelo, headquartered just outside of Denver, is committed to providing the market’s highest quality data products and best responsiveness.
